Reading too much political news is bad for your well-being

Post by obscoth » Mon, Oct 19, 2020, 12:09 AM UTC

amelius wrote: post #218

caseysoftware wrote: post #148

As I've noted here a few times: Just over 10 years ago, I conducted an experiment. I watched an hour of CNN every night but it was never that night's coverage. It was from exactly two weeks ago. It was amazing how much "breaking news!" was irrelevant or just outright wrong, how many large trend predictions were wrong, and how many "[person] will do X" were wrong. While the predictions could have been portrayed as opi…

Aren't news outlets required to rectify information they got wrong?

Post by yazaddaruvala » Mon, Oct 19, 2020, 12:13 AM UTC

Post by nradov » Mon, Oct 19, 2020, 12:21 AM UTC

tumblerz wrote: post #121

0xmohit wrote: post #99

Much of it isn't "news". It is mostly propaganda. Quoting Garry Kasparov: "The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth."

But Garry, why not both? I concur, however. Like others, on this thread, I (slowly) eliminated nearly all news from my life over the last two years. Doing this has had a profound effect on my perspectives, but has also ruined a lot of "conversation" for me. Previously, I played along in various forms of political shittalkery, but now, I find it disturbing to hear/see. Increasingly, I am concerned by the tone, content…

Post by ZephyrBlu » Mon, Oct 19, 2020, 12:52 AM UTC

gridlockd wrote: post #143

bazeblackwood wrote: post #66

> They found that those watching the most partisan television news sources—on both the left and the right—were often less knowledgeable about world events than those who consumed no news at all. This is some very fancy footwork to leave out some key information. The study found that those watching only Fox News and MSNBC answered worse than people who watch no news programs at all. As far as I can tell, this latter g…

> MSNBC at least seems to be informing their viewers on domestic issues better than that baseline. The difference is only about 5% to the "no news" crowd. Also, people that are better-educated tend to lean liberal and therefore might prefer to consume liberal outlets, but that doesn't mean liberal outlets are better at informing people. Looking at the frontpage of MSNBC, it's almost exclusively political opinion piec…

Post by lenitabinol » Mon, Oct 19, 2020, 12:55 AM UTC

deadalus wrote: post #39

I get very frustrated, sad and emotional when I read CNN or any of the major news sites. So I avoid it. Instead I use Wikipedia once a month : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events/Septembe...